We’re dealing with different MEDIUMS (or media). The 3 Hobbit movies are *movies* based on Tolkien’s books — not just The Hobbit, but also “bridges” back (or rather, forward) to Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s books are always there for you, me, and others to read.

But then I’m wasting my time, as negative nellies like you will never be satisfied.

There is a gulf between the reading experience and the movie viewing experience. Movies cannot go some places that books can go, like thoughts or prayers. They also are rarely given enough time to do justice to a book. Peter Jackson is in the enviable position of being trusted with the resources to tell the whole story. And, Tolkien himself was known to revisit the Hobbit to further tie it together with the fabric of his other stories.

Great illustrators like N. C. Wyeth, when painting scenes from a book, would often choose to avoid painting a visual representation of an exact passage. They used their art to fill in even more information in keeping with the story, thus making the written piece more whole. Of course, this brings up the question of authorship, seeing that Wyeth could then be considered almost a co-author in respect to his visual addition to the book. Do you see the license here that Peter Jackson and company are working from? They have strong precedence in making substantive contributions that fill out the story even more.

TD, you’re so right that the great JRR Tolkien himself made revisions to The Hobbit, after the 3 Lord of the Rings books were published!

As we all know, he wrote The Hobbit before LOTR, and had meant The Hobbit to be a children’s book, although he refused to “stoop down” to children as some authors would by lowering the literary quality and thereby insulting their intelligence. At the time when he wrote The Hobbit, Tolkien had a draft of The Silmarillion and had not fully fleshed out his mythology, which people insist on calling his “legendarium” but which Tolkien himself called his “sub-creation” — in deference to the Creator of all things. After the success of The Hobbit, the publisher asked him to write more, but rejected The Silmarillion. So Tolkien began writing what became LOTR and in it, he was able to flesh out his “sub-created” Middle-earth. That then required him to go back to later editions of The Hobbit to make some adjustments so that the earlier book better fits with LOTR.

As for Peter Jackson, he is limited by what the Tolkien Estate (by that we mean just one person, Tolkien’s son, Christopher) has given copyright approval — which means The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. So Jackson and the other writers made full use of the added material contained in the Appendixes to LOTR. It is that material that he’s using in the 3 Hobbit movies. As for new characters like the female Elve Tauriel, while she’s not in Tolkien’s works, nothing about his sub-creation precludes the existence of female warrior Elves.

Yeah, a lot of the rugged men are handsome, but Gimli the dwarf is too stupid and obnoxious and short to be hot! I think Sean Bean who plays Boromir is hot though! I love when he says, “What is this new devilry?!” in that hot British accent! It disturbs my dad that my sister and I would talk about Aragorn and Borimir being attractive since the actors are older than he is!